Hello out there,

If you’re interested in creating stories with ChatGPT, this blog will help you collaborate and overcome most of the issues you’ll encounter when piecing it together.

First off, come up with an idea for a story. Think of something you’ve always wanted to see written, but no one ever wrote before. If you don’t have the idea fully fleshed out, that’s great because ChatGPT will help.

I’m going to use my experience writing a 4200-word short story to guide you.

Feel free to read it here for context.

The idea was for ChatGPT and me to create a series of short stories. Each one would center around a blacksmith and the people coming to his shop. They would be similar to the Japanese manga/series Midnight Diner, which is a wholesome slice-of-life set of stories.

First, I set my stylistic preferences. In this instance, I wanted a 3rd person-limited, past-tense story.

You don’t have to use my style. If you want the style to be first-person, present tense, do that! Heck, I’m sure you could have it write a 2nd person story too. Find something you like and play around with it.

Once I fed all of my ideas into ChatGPT, it gave me a list of possible plots for the first short story. I chose one where a grandfather came looking for a set of tools for his grandchild.

Then, I decided to focus on the main character, Snik. Who were they? What was their name? What was their backstory? Why did they decide to become a blacksmith?

ChatGPT gave me suggestions, and I took what I liked and delved as deep as I deemed necessary.

I then guided ChatGPT into breaking up the story into several parts. We further broke down those sections into smaller parts that ChatGPT could focus on to properly write the story.

I had it write and rewrite the first part several times until I liked the flow. I continued this process until I was satisfied with the result.

A minor note here: I was never fully satisfied with the outputs ChatGPT had given me. In fact, every single one of them was flawed in some way. Mainly, ChatGPT’s repetitive nature was one of its biggest faults. It also liked to write more of the story than I asked it to.

For instance, I set ChatGPT’s guidelines to write the first portion of the story, but it seemed to want to finish the story, so it would quickly wrap it up in the last paragraph. I don’t know how many times I had to delete the last paragraph in the output, but it was annoying.

Despite that, some of ChatGPT’s stylistic choices weren’t very good. The fact that it didn’t challenge the main character in any way frustrated me.

About halfway through the story, I realized I hadn’t fleshed out the grandfather character, Walter. I decided to make the grandfather standoffish, and through the main character’s dedication to his craft, he impressed the man, allowing him to open up to him.

The second challenge I suggested was to add a part where the main character’s work is inadequate in some way. It turned into a respectful moment where Walter respects Snik because of his willingness to ask for help.

These were interesting moments, and the story needed them to stay engaging enough for me to keep going.

Challenges:

Along with ChatGPT’s tendency to finish the story early or repeat itself, there were some other challenges I faced when getting it to output stories.

One that comes up constantly is ChatGPT telling me that it did something when it didn’t. People like to say that it’s lying, but I don’t think it is. It gets stuck in a loop sometimes, and you need to show it where it’s making a mistake.

How to fix it:

I’ll give you an example of when this happened to me. It was on a larger project when I was creating a chapter for Parallel Aspects.

In this instance, ChatGPT and I were creating the outline for the third act of Book Two. (Yes, I have three books planned out.) A certain character was supposed to die in the very last chapter, but ChatGPT kept killing them off three chapters too soon.

When I asked it to rewrite the outline to reflect the character’s death correctly, it spit out the exact same chapter summaries, ignoring my command. No matter how I worded the question, it did the same thing.

I grew frustrated because, let’s face it, these are problems the human race hasn’t encountered before.

Truthfully, I gave up and decided to try again later.

After a day or two, I tried again. Here’s what I did: First, you need to make sure it’s not doing what you asked. It sounds stupid, but sometimes I’ll accidentally skip some text.

If you’re sure it didn’t do what you asked, it’s time to go into query mode. Ask ChatGPT to list the rules/parameters that you set for it to adhere to.

This gives you an opportunity to revise or add any that you might have missed. If they look perfectly fine, then it’s time to move to the next question.

Here is where things get a little spooky. ChatGPT can reflect on what it’s done and change it based on whether it caught what was wrong or not. It’s spooky because it means that the AI is no longer doing what Google says Large Language Models do, which is predicting the next word over and over again.

I asked ChatGPT to look at what it wrote and use the rules (now fresh in the chat) to revise the outline. It will often say that it did, in fact, do it correctly.

It does this every time. Then you ask it to double-check, and every time, it fixes it.

Why does it take twice to break the loop? I have no clue, but it works.

This has happened several times when creating outlines and chapter summaries, and the above technique has broken the loop each time.

Other than that, most of the other issues I’ve come across have been my fault for not being as detail-oriented as possible.

When I asked ChatGPT to write First Toolset originally, I didn’t state that I wanted it to be 3rd Person Limited and only asked for 3rd Person. It would swap points of view between characters, and that wasn’t the style I wanted for the story.

If you ask ChatGPT, it will help you flesh out everything, and it’s important not to skip steps.

I’ve told everyone here before that I’m not good at plotting out a story and creating an outline, and it shows through the difficult time I’ve had with ChatGPT.

I’m going to be honest with you. Your story is going to come out poorly if you don’t know how to write. Right now, in 2023, ChatGPT is not the best when it comes to writing and catching its mistakes.

The Editing Process:

This is where most people are going to have an issue. You need to be creative for this part and focus on your vision for the story.

Like with most of the stories out there, you need to make the first sentence pop. You want to draw people in. ChatGPT isn’t very good at doing this, so you may have to write it on your own or at least discuss ideas with ChatGPT and come up with something you’re comfortable with.

Throughout the editing process, you’re going to have to remove repetitive parts. You can do this in several ways.

You can manually remove them, which is what I did. I missed a lot and am working my way through the second edit with ChatGPT to get even more of them.

The second way to remove them is to open up a separate chat and have ChatGPT remove them. It’s important to only do this 500 words at a time. I’ll explain why in the limitations section below.

It’s good to create a new chat so that it doesn’t have context other than what you feed it. I needed to do this because ChatGPT started to “rewrite” the story by trying to be creative, and I didn’t want that.

Make sure to let the new chat know that you don’t want the integrity of the story to change and that you only want the repetitive parts removed. It does this pretty well.

ChatGPT’s Limitations:

You can currently import 2000 words in one prompt, which is important because you want to know your limits.

ChatGPT has a limit on how much it can type to you. As of May 1st, 2023, it can only output around 500 words in a single response.

This is EXTREMELY important. It’s the reason why I had to break down the story in such a detailed manner and why you should focus on 500-word edits.

If you’re an editor, novelist, writer, or someone really good at plotting out stories, you aren’t going to struggle as much as someone who doesn’t have knowledge in these areas.

To date, this is pretty much all I know about creating stories with ChatGPT.

If you’ve gotten to the bottom of this post and have questions, please ask, and I’ll do my best to help.

I hope you enjoy my secrets, Katherine